As part of my ongoing effort to make sure that I never run out of blogging material, I subscribe to a number of quack e-mail newsletters. In fact, sometimes I think I’ve probably overdone it. Every day, I get several notices and pleas from various wretched hives of scum and quackery, such as NaturalNews.com, Mercola.com, and various antivaccine websites. I think of it as my way of keeping my finger on the pulse of the antiscience and pseudoscience wing of medicine, but I must admit that I don’t really read them all, but they do allow me to know what the quacks are selling and what new arguments they’re coming up with without actually going to each of their websites. I can then judge by the headlines and the blurbs included in the e-mails whether I think it’s worth it to go to the website itself and, of course, whether the topic might represent fodder for a good blog post. I will admit that not all the sites I monitor are as loony as the Health Ranger’s. In fact, I monitor the blogs and websites of the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM), various naturopath organizations, and the like in order to learn of the “respectable” arguments being used to tout various nostrums.
Sometimes—albeit rarely—I even learn about some interesting new science.

One of the most common themes (besides antivaccine hysteria, claims that diet can prevent 95% of all cancers, etc.) tends to be one of a variety of pitches for various “cures” of serious diseases like cancer and heart disease that “they” don’t want you to know about; i.e., the Kevin Trudeau gambit. Who this “they” is can range from doctors to pharmaceutical companies to universities to the government, but the central message is that someone out there doesn’t want you to know The Truth. A variation of this sort of appeal is the claim that there is a promising new therapy, a cure even, usually natural, that is languishing somewhere because it can’t be patented, because pharmaceutical companies would lose money if it were ever validated and brought into clinical use, or because it goes against current medical dogma. It doesn’t even have to be natural. After all, dichloroacetate (DCA) is not exactly “natural.” After it was shown to have promise in animal models, a pesticide salesman named Jim Tassano sold DCA bought from chemical companies to desperate cancer patients from a website that claimed to be selling it only for pets with cancer, a ruse that fooled no one. Yet the “natural treatment” crowd embraced it whole-heartedly because it looked as though sellers of DCA were sticking it to The Man.(more…)